Native Languages of the Americas: Endangered Language Revitalization and Revival

Many American Indian languages are undergoing something called "revival" or "revitalization."
What exactly, is this?

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To understand the terms "revival" and "revitalization," first you have to understand the
current state of these languages. Linguists have a variety of grim-sounding terms for
languages with few or no native speakers. A language which has no native speakers (people who
grew up speaking the language as a child) is called "dead" or "extinct." A language which
has no native speakers in the youngest generation is called "moribund." A language which
has very few native speakers is called "endangered" or "imperilled."

Language revival and language revitalization are attempts to preserve endangered languages,
and that is precisely what our website project is about. Of the 800+ Amerindian languages,
five hundred are endangered or worse. Most of the others are in Central and South America;
in North America only Navajo usage is increasing, and even the relatively "healthy" languages
like Cherokee--spoken by 22,000 people--are threatened by low percentages of children learning
the languages.

It is true that in the natural course of things, languages, like everything else, sometimes
die. People choose, for a variety of valid social reasons, not to teach their children their
own mother tongue. In the case of American Indian languages, however, the language drop-off has
been artificially induced and precipitous, and just as with the human-caused endangered
species crisis, it is worth doing something about it. Amerindian languages were deliberately
destroyed, particularly in North America. In the earlier days of European contact, Indians
were separated from their linguistic kin and resettled hundreds of miles away with
individuals from other tribes who couldn't understand each other. Historically, this is the
single most effective way to eliminate minority languages (for obvious reasons). Even as
recently as the 50's, Indian children were
being forcibly removed from non-English-speaking households and sent to boarding schools to
be "socialized." They were routinely punished there for speaking their languages, and
Indian-speaking parents began hiding their languages in hopes of keeping their children
in their houses or at least making school life easier for them. The percentage of Cherokee
children being raised bilingually fell from 75% to 5% during the US boarding-school-policy
days. Other languages, with smaller userbases and no literary tradition like Cherokee's to
buoy them, have died entirely. This was not a natural death. Existing linguistic communities
do not normally lose their languages after losing a war, even after being conquered and
colonized, the way immigrant groups do. The usual pattern is bilingualism, which may be stably
maintained indefinitely (most West Africans have been raised bilingually ever since colonization
there; so have many South American natives, where the linguistically destructive policies used
by the US and Canada were never implemented. In Paraguay, for example, more than 90% of the
population is bilingual in Spanish and Guarani, and has been for centuries.)

Now that the Amerindian languages of North America are in the precarious situation they are,
though, simply leaving them alone will not cause their extinction trends to end. Once the
majority of the young people in a community don't understand a language anymore, its usage
declines rapidly. This is where language revival and language revitalization come in.
Language revival is the resurrection of a "dead" language, one with no existing
native speakers. Language revitalization is the rescue of a "dying" language.
There has only been one
successful instance to date of a complete language revival, creating a new generation of
native speakers without even one living native speaker to help. (That instance was the
reincarnation of Hebrew in modern Israel, and there were many extenuating circumstances
associated with it.) However, there have been successful partial revivals--where a
no-longer-spoken language has been revived as a second language sufficiently for religious,
cultural, and literary purposes. There have also been successful language revitalizations,
where languages in decline have recovered. It may sound silly and New Agey to say that the
prestige of a language and the self-esteem of its speakers plays a pivotal role in
revitalization, but it has been proven again and again. Navajo, for instance, was in steep
decline until the 40's, when the language, once deemed worthless, was used by the
Navajo Code Talkers to stymie the
Germans and Japanese in World War II.
With Navajo's validity as a real, complex, and useful language suddenly nationally acknowledged,
its usage shot up, and today this language, once on the brink of extinction, is in good
health.

By inspiring the younger generations to take an interest and pride in their ancestral
languages, and by providing the means for them to learn it (something we hope this website
can help contribute towards,) it is possible to reverse downward linguistic trends.
The true revival of a "dead" language is something I am more reluctant to raise hopes
about, but to revive such a language enough for children to have access to traditional
literature, to use it for cultural and religious purposes, even to speak it as a second
language in limited fashion? Certainly! Kids can learn Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish if it
suits them, and they can just as easily learn Miami or Siuslaw. Latin, the most famously
"dead" language of all, is learned by millions of schoolchildren well enough that they can
read Virgil (or snigger over Catullus), and is used liturgically by Catholics worldwide.
It may be true that once a language is dead it is dead forever, but some kinds of dead are
clearly preferable to others. If the lost languages of the Americas can all be as dead
as Latin, then, well, as we say in my own successfully revived ancestral language:dayenu, that would be enough.